This the story of a boy named Russel. He was a generally well behaved boy who never really gave his parents much trouble. He lived in a big house somewhere in Maine. He loved the old house. He would explore the house, pretending to be a famous archeologist. He loved archeology. It was one of his favorite things. He'd pour through old books about ancient cultures and read magazines about expeditions in dangerous jungles. The only thing he loved more than ancient cultures was animals. He loved animals. So much so, that he would upset his parents a lot by bringing home a wild animal, asking them if he could keep it. He had several different pets. A pet lizard named Indy. A cat named Lara. A dog named Anubis. He wanted a bird but his parents wouldn't let him. He had a relatively happy childhood.
When he went to the beach one day to play with his dog, Anubis, he heard the distant sound of drums. Where was the sound coming from he wondered. His dog ran up to a strange object half buried in the sand and growled at it.
"What have you found boy? What is it?" Russel said.
He heard the sound of drums again only much closer. It seemed to come from the strange object. He went up and pulled it out of the sand. It was a long thin wooden box. He brush it off and saw that it was a board game. An old and beautifully carved wooden board game labeled Jumanji. There were pictures of animals on the outside of the box and a the picture of a hunter or explorer with a pith hat and mustache. Russel was intrigued. Anubis wouldn't stop barking at it however so he grabbed the dog and walked back to his house, taking the board game with him.
When he got back to his house he put Anubis in the backyard and rushed up to his room to take a closer look at the game.
When he got back to his room he placed the game on his bed. The lid of the box was hinged on both sides and opened in the middle. It unfolded out into the game board. The board itself was a classic board game with a starting area and spaces leading up to an end. The end was in the middle of the board and was an interesting looking black circle that looked like it was made of glass. On the edges of the board there was a compartment where the game pieces and the dice were kept. The game pieces looked to be carved from different colored stone. The dice looked to be made from some sort of bone. On the edges of the board in the same area the dice were kept there were instructions. Russel read them aloud.
"Jumanji: A game for those who wish to find a way to leave their world behind. You roll the dice to move your token, doubles get another turn, and the first one to reach the end wins.
Adventurers beware: do not start unless you intend to finish. The exciting consequences of the game will vanish only when the player has reached Jumanji and called out its name."
"Wow. This game looks so cool. It must be an antique. I wonder how old it is?" Russel said to himself. The antique quality of the game excited him. The theme of the game appealed to him. An exploration of a dangerous jungle. He really wanted to play.
The only thing about Russel's life that wasn't that great was that he didn't have all that many friends. Most kids his age thought him weird. So when he encountered an interesting board game like this he was a bit sad, since there'd be no one to play it with. He resolved to play the game anyway and took out the crocodile token. he held it in his hand for a bit, when it flew from his hand and adhered itself to the starting space.
"Woah. It must be magnets or something." Russel suggested. He rolled the dice.
Seven.
His token moved seven spaces all by itself. He stared at it in shock. Then words started to form in the black glass circle in the middle of the board.
"His fangs are sharp, he likes your taste, Your party better move post haste." Russel read the riddle aloud.
Suddenly he heard something down the hall. His cat Lara hissed at something. The something she hissed at growled in response. A deep growl that sounded to big to be another house cat.
Russel stood up and stared at his bedroom door. Did he want to find out what that was? No. He had a pretty good idea of what that was given the sound of it's growl. He loved animals after all. The thing was, just because he loved big animals did not mean he wanted one in his house. It must be the game he thought! He had to finish the game or his parents would be really upset to find a lion in the house. He just knew he'd be blamed for this.
He went back to the game on his bed. Since no one else was playing he could roll again. He picked up the dice and shivered, then he rolled.
Three.
The crocodile token moved up three spaces.
"In the jungle you must wait, until the dice read five or eight." Russel stared at it in shock. "What does that mean? I'm the only player!"
Suddenly the board sucked Russel into the black glass circle.
Russel came to lying in some foliage. There are jungle sounds all around him. He looked around. He was in a jungle! The game told him he had to stay there till the dice read five or eight...but Russel was the only one playing. How was he going to get out? He sat on the ground and put his head in his hands. He was screwed. It truly looked like he was stuck here.
It was awhile before Russel got up. When he did he just wandered for awhile, not really knowing where he was going. He heard sounds through the trees that scared him. After awhile it started to get dark. He got very scared. Russel knew that things would only get worse in the dark. He needed to find shelter. As if the game itself had listened to his thoughts there was suddenly a crude hut ahead of him. He ran to it.
The hut looked like something out of Robinson Crusoe. It was made of bamboo and logs and was held together by crude rope. Near the entrance there were words carved into a log. "Alan Parrish was here."
Russel went inside the hut that was barely closed to the elements. There was a crude bed at the end of the room and various crude furniture around the room. There was food on one of the tables but it looked like it had been there for a very long time and had rotted mostly away. Russel wrinkled his nose and took what remained of the food and threw it out of the hut. Then he went and laid down in the bed and cried himself to sleep.
Fairly quickly, Russel learned to survive in the jungle. He learned he had to be quick and that nothing should be underestimated. Even some of the plants in Jumanji were deadly. He learned what animals and plants to avoid and how to avoid them. He learned what was safe to eat and where it was safe to get a drink of water. Most of his knowledge of jungle animals came from his long hours staying up at night reading, back in the real world. But not all of Jumanji's animals seemed to fit the information he knew. It was like Jumanji was an exaggeration of what a jungle was supposed to be. Animals that didn't fit together in the same location wandered around together. The rhinos were all albino and seemed to be carnivorous. There were jaguars in one location and lions in another. It seemed like a mishmash of a jungle. But Russel learned how to survive it.
About a month or so into Russel's life in the jungle he started getting rather lonely. He also figured out that some of the things he needed, like citronella candles, could not be found in the jungle. As if the jungle knew of his worries, Russel ended up running across a large bazaar filled with people. The people didn't seem to even really notice that Russel existed that much and didn't really talk to him other than to hock their wares at him. But he felt a little better knowing that there were people in Jumanji. Even if they didn't really seem like real people. The culture of the bazaar was strange. It seemed like everything else in Jumanji, a mishmash of several different cultures. It looked like every bazaar he'd seen in pictures in explorer magazines. There were bits of Africa, bits of South America, bits of India, bits of Asia all mashed together. Russel just accepted it and bought the supplies he needed. He paid with things he'd found in the jungle and all of the shopkeepers seemed to accept anything he wanted to give them. He chatted with several of the people but they didn't really talk much back to him, as if they didn't really have anything to say. He guessed fake people didn't have anything to small talk with.
He settled into the hut he christened as Alan Parrish's hut. He made it his own, fixing it up as best as he could. The citronella candles he had helped keep away all the different sizes of mosquitos, from the normal sized ones to the huge scary ones. It was like a home. Russel still missed his family and his pets though. He wished he had someone to keep him company at his hut.
About a year later Russel comes across an injured buzzard. He took it back to his hut and nursed it back to health as best as he could. The bird started to trust him and when it had healed it stuck around and sometimes gave him dead things as gifts. He grew rather fond of the bird and named it Jack. After awhile Jack and Russel seemed to become the best of friends. Jack would fly ahead of him and check to see if anything bad was in the area before returning to him. Russel would give the bird small animals as treats in return.
A few years went by. Russel was growing up. He was no longer the small boy who dreamed of one day going on an adventure. He was now a teenager who lived day to day hoping that he would survive the day. His old love of archeology was still there, and sometimes he would stare at the ruins he'd run across in the jungle.
One day the forest grew very quiet as Russel was walking along. That didn't seem to be a good sign to Russel or Jack. Jack scouted around for Russel. Suddenly, the shot of a gun was heard! Jack barely escaped being shot! Russel ran to where Jack had landed and checked him over to see if he was alright.
Suddenly a man came through the trees. A man in a pith hat and old fashioned explorer's garb. He had a very large gun. The man looked shocked to see another person in the jungle.
Russel stared at the man. "Hello. Are you a real person too? Or are you just part of the game?" He said hoping that the man was indeed real. But then he realized that he had seen this man before. On the game box. He was the man in the pith hat on the cover of the game. Russel sighed in disappointment. That meant that the man was just another part of the game.
"Hello there young man. I didn't know there was someone else in this jungle. You know, you remind me of someone I used to know. His name was Alan. Pity he got away. Maybe you wont." the man said before raising his gun and pointing it at Russel.
Russel's eyes widen in realization. This man was just another of the jungle's dangers.
"Go on, start running boy." The hunter said.
Russel ran. And ran. He didn't stop running till he got back to his hut. By that time the hunter had lost him. He collapsed on the floor of the hut, breathing heavily.
Russel kept running into the hunter several times over the next few weeks. He always had to run away as fast as he could and dodge the hunter somewhere in the jungle.
Russel, not one to give up, started to plan how he could stop the hunter from hunting him. He devised several traps around the jungle to trap the hunter.
Then one day he found the hunter caught in one of his traps. He was hanging upside down by a rope.
"Get me down from here this instant! You'll pay for this boy!" the hunter shouted.
Russel picked up the hunter's gun which had fallen to the ground. He aimed it at the hunter.
The hunter laughed at him. "Going to shoot me boy? Go on. Do it. I dare you...You don't have the courage to do it do you boy?"
Russel had learned over the course of his stay in Jumanji that the rules of the jungle were Kill or Be Killed. But this was a man he was aiming at. He didn't know if he could pull the trigger.
"Let me down from here right now and I will give you a head start. I promise." the hunter said.
Russel shook his head. This wasn't a man he reminded himself. He was just part of the game. It wasn't like killing someone real. He raised the large gun again and pointed it back at the hunter. He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
"BLAM!" The gun went off and Russel staggered, nearly falling down.
He opened his eyes to see the hunter disappearing in a shower of blood. The blood seemed to soak into the ground and disappear. Russel let out a sigh of relief.
His relief was short lived however. The blood reappeared at his feet and ran up his legs like it had a mind of its own. He screamed in terror as the hunter's blood covered him. When the blood completely covered him, the pain started.
Pain unlike anything he had ever known ran through. Russel couldn't see anything. Couldn't hear anything. Couldn't feel anything but pain. His head was filled with it. Then mercifully he passed out.
Somewhere in the real world a crocodile game token fell off the game board and slotted itself back into it's storage area.
Some time later he woke up. He was lying on the ground staring up at the trees. The trees seemed different somehow. He felt strange. His whole body felt different. His mind felt different but he didn't know how.
He staggered to his feet, and went over to the water to see his reflection. What he saw in the water made him scream. That wasn't his face! It was the face of a grown man! A rough looking grown man with a hard savage looking face. His clothes were different too. He was dressed as if he was a modern explorer with a long coat. He had a revolver strapped to his hip. In his mind he looked like an evil version of Indiana Jones. He tried removing the coat and throwing it in the water but the coat reappeared on him right after. He stared at his reflection. He stared at his reflection for a very long time.
Time just seemed to stop mattering to him after that. He just wandered the jungle for awhile. Jack the buzzard continued to follow him but he hardly paid the bird any mind. The animals in the jungle seemed to either pay no attention to him or just seemed to scatter when he walked past. He had loved animals. He remembered that. He barely remember his past. Barely remembered his name. He knew his first name was Russel but didn't remember his last name. Why couldn't he remember his last name? He cried a little as he walked through the jungle aimlessly.
And then one day when he was staring at his reflection in the water for awhile he felt the jungle change somehow. It felt different. His left eye started hurting. He closed his eyes in pain. When he opened them he was in a small camp and there were several other people milling around. He looked around confused. Where was he?
One of the men came up to him and spoke to him.
"Sir? Van Pelt? I heard that Seaplane McDonough has arrived in Jumanji. He's trying to help Nigel Billingsley return the jewel."
Russel shook himself out of his musings. Of course. How could he have forgotten? His name was Russel Van Pelt. He was an archeologist who had gone after the Jaguar's Eye of Jumanji. When he had finally claimed it, it had been stolen from him by Billingsley who wanted to return it to where it came from. He didn't want the jewel to be returned. Why would he with all this power he had found with it? He could control the animals of Jumanji. They obeyed his every command.
His faithful bird landed on his shoulder. He whispered to it and the bird flew off to go follow Seaplane. He would get that jewel back! And then maybe his head wouldn't feel so strange anymore.